Dynamic analysis on simultaneous iEEG-MEG data via hidden Markov model.

BACKGROUND: Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings are used for clinical evaluation prior to surgical resection of the focus of epileptic seizures and also provide a window into normal brain function. A major difficulty with interpreting iEEG results at the group level is inconsistent placement of electrodes between subjects making it difficult to select contacts that correspond to the same functional areas. Recent work using time delay embedded hidden Markov model (HMM) applied to magnetoencephalography (MEG) resting data revealed a distinct set of brain states with each state engaging a specific set of cortical regions. Here we use a rare group dataset with simultaneously acquired resting iEEG and MEG to test whether there is correspondence between HMM states and iEEG power changes that would allow classifying iEEG contacts into functional clusters. METHODS: Simultaneous MEG-iEEG recordings were performed at rest on 11 patients with epilepsy whose intracranial electrodes were implanted for pre-surgical evaluation. Pre-processed MEG sensor data was projected to source space. Time delay embedded HMM was then applied to MEG time series. At the same time, iEEG time series were analyzed with time-frequency decomposition to obtain spectral power changes with time. To relate MEG and iEEG results, correlations were computed between HMM probability time courses of state activation and iEEG power time course from the mid contact pair for each electrode in equally spaced frequency bins and presented as correlation spectra for the respective states and iEEG channels. Association of iEEG electrodes with HMM states based on significant correlations was compared to that based on the distance to peaks in subject-specific state topographies. RESULTS: Five HMM states were inferred from MEG. Two of them corresponded to the left and the right temporal activations and had a spectral signature primarily in the theta/alpha frequency band. All the electrodes had significant correlations with at least one of the states (p < 0.05 uncorrected) and for 27/50 electrodes these survived within-subject FDR correction (q < 0.05). These correlations peaked in the theta/alpha band. There was a highly significant dependence between the association of states and electrodes based on functional correlations and that based on spatial proximity (p = 5.6e-6,χ2 test for independence). Despite the potentially atypical functional anatomy and physiological abnormalities related to epilepsy, HMM model estimated from the patient group was very similar to that estimated from healthy subjects. CONCLUSION: Epilepsy does not preclude HMM analysis of interictal data. The resulting group functional states are highly similar to those reported for healthy controls. Power changes recorded with iEEG correlate with HMM state time courses in the alpha-theta band and the presence of this correlation can be related to the spatial location of electrode contacts close to the individual peaks of the corresponding state topographies. Thus, the hypothesized relation between iEEG contacts and HMM states exists and HMM could be further explored as a method for identifying comparable iEEG channels across subjects for the purposes of group analysis.

Modality alignment contrastive learning for severity assessment of COVID-19 from lung ultrasound and clinical information.

The outbreak of COVID-19 around the world has caused great pressure to the health care system, and many efforts have been devoted to artificial intelligence (AI)-based analysis of CT and chest X-ray images to help alleviate the shortage of radiologists and improve the diagnosis efficiency. However, only a few works focus on AI-based lung ultrasound (LUS) analysis in spite of its significant role in COVID-19. In this work, we aim to propose a novel method for severity assessment of COVID-19 patients from LUS and clinical information. Great challenges exist regarding the heterogeneous data, multi-modality information, and highly nonlinear mapping. To overcome these challenges, we first propose a dual-level supervised multiple instance learning module (DSA-MIL) to effectively combine the zone-level representations into patient-level representations. Then a novel modality alignment contrastive learning module (MA-CLR) is presented to combine representations of the two modalities, LUS and clinical information, by matching the two spaces while keeping the discriminative features. To train the nonlinear mapping, a staged representation transfer (SRT) strategy is introduced to maximumly leverage the semantic and discriminative information from the training data. We trained the model with LUS data of 233 patients, and validated it with 80 patients. Our method can effectively combine the two modalities and achieve accuracy of 75.0% for 4-level patient severity assessment, and 87.5% for the binary severe/non-severe identification. Besides, our method also provides interpretation of the severity assessment by grading each of the lung zone (with accuracy of 85.28%) and identifying the pathological patterns of each lung zone. Our method has a great potential in real clinical practice for COVID-19 patients, especially for pregnant women and children, in aspects of progress monitoring, prognosis stratification, and patient management.

Minimum-Cost Offloading for Collaborative Task Execution of MEC-Assisted Platooning.

In this paper, we study the offloading decision of collaborative task execution between platoon and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) server. The mobile application is represented by a series of fine-grained tasks that form a linear topology, each of which is either executed on a local vehicle, offloaded to other members of the platoon, or offloaded to a MEC server. The objective of the design is to minimize the cost of tasks offloading and meets the deadline of tasks execution. The cost minimized task decision problem is transformed into the shortest path problem, which is limited by the deadline of the tasks on a directed acyclic graph. The classical Lagrangian Relaxation-based Aggregated Cost (LARAC) algorithm is adopted to solve the problem approximately. Numerical analysis shows that the scheduling method of the tasks decision can be well applied to the platoon scenario and execute the tasks in cooperation with the MEC server. In addition, compared with task local execution, platoon execution and MEC server execution, the optimal offloading decision for collaborative task execution can significantly reduce the cost of task execution and meet deadlines.